Critics of US President Donald Trump’s decision to order Operation Epic Fury have reached for the easiest explanation first: he did it for Israel.
That is too small an argument for a much larger strategic event.
Yes, Israel mattered. It mattered because Iran’s threat to Israel was not rhetorical, not theoretical, and not safely containable. Tehran’s missile program, proxy network, and nuclear ambitions had created understandable existential concern in the Jewish state. And the relationship with Israel is central to American, and indeed all Western interests in the region.
The White House framed Operation Epic Fury as a campaign to eliminate an “imminent nuclear threat,” degrade Iran’s ballistic missile arsenal, cripple its proxy network, and strike the regime’s wider capacity for aggression.
But reducing Trump’s order to “doing Israel a favor” misses the real point.
The more serious case is that Trump moved because the regional balance of power had been allowed to tilt much too far in Iran’s favor, and that tilt was beginning to rearrange the Middle East in ways...
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